


The Deep and Far

by squidproquo



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Adventure & Romance, Alternate Universe, And the New, F/M, The Old Gods - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-10-05
Updated: 2014-10-05
Packaged: 2018-02-19 23:36:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,146
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2407040
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/squidproquo/pseuds/squidproquo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Stranger, who appears as a rough man at arms with a half-scarred face and rasping voice, allows Ned to trade his own eternal rest to insure his daughter's life... But the God of Death clearly has plans of his own for Sansa.</p><p>(Set in a world where Sandor is the Stranger, Gregor is the Warrior, and the Seven are engaged in their own Game of Thrones.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Deep and Far

**Author's Note:**

> Much thanks to TheCakeConundrum and LadyCyprus for encouraging me to post this <3

Eddard Stark of House Stark, sometime Lord of Winterfell and Warden of the North, former Hand of the King, was a dead man. He knew it from the instant he opened his eyes. Moments before, as he’d lowered his head in anticipation of the bite of his own blade, the world had been vibrant with color and sound and people crowding the steps of the great Sept of Baelor. Some had clamored for his head, others for mercy, but they had been there, a great living mass of humanity. Now the world was empty. There was no sound, no people, and all the colors were muted, seen as through a fog. He felt a sudden sense of separateness such as he’d never known before, followed by a fierce rush of grief.

It was done. He no longer had any place amongst the living, and the thought of it was sharper than the Valyrian steel that had so recently kissed his throat. He had said once that his life was not some precious thing to him, and it wasn’t, but now faced with its loss he mourned it all the same. He mourned his wife and his children, mourned his loss of them, their loss of him, and their potential fates. Gods knew it was now a dangerous time to be a wolf in Westeros. With blinding certainty he felt that his was not the last Stark blood to be shed. 17 years before, he and Robert had taken the Seven Kingdoms by force of arms partially in response to his own father’s murder. Would Robb do any less?

Robb at least was a young warrior, strong and capable and growing fast. Bran, Rickon, they were safe at Winterfell, Jon at the Wall, Arya in the fortuitous company of Yoren, a good and upright man. And Cat, his beloved Cat: no matter where she was, she was the strongest of them all. His fear for them was insistent but dull, an ache in the back of his mind. It was his fear for Sansa that made him sick, deep in the pit of his stomach. Her life was a precious thing to him, more important to him than his own honor. He’d knelt as a traitor for her, to protect her, for all the good it had done.

He stood and turned, staring at the spot where his delicate little girl had waited for him, trusting that mad, cruel boy she so foolishly and innocently believed she loved. Gods, he should have taken better care of her, should never have brought her south. Should have defied even the king he esteemed as a brother in order to keep her safe, even if she’d hated him for it. Was she crying now? In some other world she was there, right there in front of him, but in this twilight world he could not see her. Had they forced her to watch him die, forced her to keep her eyes open? And how could she possibly survive, an innocent wolf pup amongst lions? Of all the things he’d left behind, he knew she would haunt him the most, because he had failed her.

He hung his head and felt tears gather and fall. It was done.

“Feeling sorry for yourself, are we, Lord Stark?” a voice rasped, and suddenly a giant of a man stood before him. His face was terrifying, half marred by thick burn scars made even more unsettling by the contrast of the utter plainness of the other side. Even unmarked, the set of his mouth was cruel, and his mutilation only added a brutal twist to his lips, burned as they were at the corner. But the real horror was in his eyes, the dark grey of pewter but glowing with embers of indiscriminate rage. There was danger in those eyes, violence and death. Reflexively, Eddard reached for the sword that should have hung at his side.

The Stranger- for he could be none other- threw back his head and laughed, the sound a deep vibration more felt than heard. “Oh, you think to fight Death without even a sword? Yes, that’s what I’d expect of you. Better than your bloody sniveling. But I’m the one enemy you cannot hope to defeat, armed or no.”

“Are you my enemy?” Eddard asked, still wishing for steel at his side. The god’s laughter was as terrifying as his face, as terrifying as his silence.

“Depends who you ask,” the Stranger answered, amusement still coloring his rough voice. “Does it matter? I have you, one way or another.”

Eddard closed his eyes against a fresh wave of grief. “Aye, my lord, that you do.”

“Fuck your ‘lords’,” the god snarled. “And fuck your self-pity, too. I’d expected better of you, Stark. I’m less a stranger to you than I am to others.”

“True enough. You’ve been my companion these many years and more. And I have no self-pity. I’m a soldier. I learned how to die a long time ago.”

The Stranger glared. “Don’t lie to me. You yearn for life, you ache with its absence. Like all the others,” he added, sounding almost disappointed. “Next you’ll be attempting to bargain with me in all your pathetic desperation.”

“Oh, I’m desperate,” Eddard acknowledged, letting his longing fill his eyes, his voice, his soul (if he still had one). Letting the God of Death see it. “But surely I’m not the first man to come to you with business unfinished.”

“You mortals and your petty concerns!” The Stranger shook his fearsome head, then spat contemptuously. “Everything you’ve ever cared about is meaningless. Do you understand? Wealth, power, victory… You bring none of it with you to me. There is no wealth in death, and you have no power, and this-” he gestured to the deserted world around him, to Eddard’s life’s blood staining the stone at their feet. “This is _my_ victory.”

“I wish you joy of it, _my lord_ ,” Eddard snapped. “I care nothing for any of what you’ve named. I care for my family. My daughter… My eldest girl, alone with the monster who murdered me. That is not meaningless to me.”

For a brief moment, the god’s eyes flared with unholy fire. His gaze grew distant, as though looking at something far ahead, farther ahead than Eddard himself could hope to see, and then his eyes refocused and the silver flames died down again. “Your daughter will be along shortly. Stupid little bird, tries to teach that buggering bastard of an incest-born king how to fly. For you, Lord Stark. And for her vengeance.”

Eddard felt his blood run cold. “No,” he whispered, blinded by a sudden vision of his daughter falling, falling, arms spread wide, deep red hair billowing around her pale and perfect face. “No. Not her. Please, no.”

“What, you don’t want revenge?” The Stranger snorted, and it was such a sarcastic, human sound that Eddard might have laughed if not for the agonies he was suffering. “You can’t tell me you’re not anxious for that little shit to get what he deserves. Hells, I am, and he didn’t strike my head off with my own sword.”

“You don’t understand.” Eddard’s voice was taut with rage near equal to what the God of Death burned with. “How could you? I don’t know what you are but you’re no father, or you’d know.”

“No,” the Stranger agreed. “I’m no father. Seems I’m a god instead, so you might have a care with your tongue.”

“Fuck your gods!” Eddard sneered, unheeding of the warning. He was beyond fear, beyond care now. “She deserves a life! A loving husband, children of her own. Not… Not what you say. I care nothing to be avenged, not at such a cost.”

With a movement so swift it was almost imperceptible, the Stranger waved his hand. The air seemed to ripple for a moment before solidifying into the very image of his daughter, her fiery hair waving gently down her back, lips upturned in a soft smile. A smile he’d never see again in life. “She looks so like her mother,” Eddard murmured in despair.

The god ignored him, staring instead at Sansa’s likeness, an arrested expression on his disfigured face. There was an intensity to his look that Eddard didn’t understand, but feared. “What would you give?” he asked suddenly, voice low, eyes never leaving Sansa’s form, one large hand reaching as though to cup the illusion's cheek.

“I don’t understand.”

“For her life, Lord Stark. Would you bargain to save her? What would you give?”

“Everything,” he answered quietly. Immediately. “Anything. If I had anything to give. But I have nothing, here, in this place… What would you accept?”

The Stranger finally tore his gaze away from Sansa, eyes narrowed and calculating. “I had intended to send you on.”

“On?”

“On,” he repeated enigmatically. “North, might be. To your Old Gods and Kings of Winter.”

At the god’s words, Eddard felt a pulling sensation in his chest, a sense of swirling snows calling him home. He could not answer it. It wasn’t strong enough- nothing was strong enough- to override his love for his daughter.

“And if I stayed?” he asked, quietly.

“I daresay I’d find use for you,” the Stranger replied, nonchalant as only a god could be. “But you’d never rest. Your soul would have no peace.”

Eddard scoffed at that. “Don’t speak to me of peace. As if I’d ever know it, realizing I could have saved her life and failed to try.”

“Then you will swear your sword to me,” the God of Death intoned, a weird magic humming in his words, its power inexorable. “You will grant me your service, and one thing more.”

“What more have I to offer?” Eddard asked, confused.

The Stranger smiled, contorting the burned half of his face the way time stiffens and distorts the features of the dead, and it was the most horrifying sight Eddard had beheld in his entire life. Or afterlife. “You’ll know when I demand it of you. Now, on your knees.”

He felt an almost overwhelming compulsion to kneel, but resisted. “If it’s all the same to you, I’ll take my vows on my feet.”

There was a flicker of respect on the god’s face as he nodded, and the all-consuming need to kneel vanished. “Very well.” The Stranger drew himself up, seemed to grow even larger as the already faded sun dimmed and magic crackled in the air. He absorbed all light until the world grew dark and he was nothing more than a shadow, though his silver eyes glowed brighter with every word. For the first time, Eddard truly felt that he was in the presence of a being powerful beyond his own imagining. He realized the rough, scarred man at arms was merely the more human façade that cloaked this unfathomable deity.

“Eddard Stark of House Stark,” he began, and his voice was layered, echoing with the combined tones of all the old gods and all the new. And others, perhaps. “Beware: the vows of the Deep and Far are unbreakable and eternal. Truly eternal, as no mortal can comprehend. Knowing this, do you swear yourself to me in death, to serve me, uphold me, and enforce my will here in the Deep and Far, and the World of the Light of the Seven?”

Though Eddard had no intention of fighting the oath, the urge to swear was so strong he doubted he could have even had he tried. “I do so swear.” On saying those words, every muscle in his body relaxed with the relief of it.

The shadow that was the God of Death reached out to him with both hands. There was a sword balanced flat across his palms, and the god loosened it in its black leather scabbard to show it to Eddard more fully. Staring hard, he realized it was a darker twin of Ice. Where Ice’s blade was the color of smoke, this sword was dark as dragonglass, but more reflective, and sharpened to a wicked cutting edge. The grip was wrapped with black leather, the pommel adorned with a faceted black diamond, sparkling as the blade, and the crossguard was engraved with the legend “Winter Has Come”.

“Then I charge you to take this sword, and wield it so that no dead shall walk in life. For that is not their path.” The Stranger slid the weapon back into its sheath before offering it to Eddard. He accepted it with trembling hands, feeling a jolt of power up his arm the second he touched the grip. “Name your blade, Eddard Stark.”

“I name it The Long Night,” Eddard whispered.

Light seemed to return to the Deep and Far as the God of Death smiled. “May it bring darkness to our enemies.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> The line "...Take this sword, and wield it so that no dead shall walk in life. For that is not their path." comes from a novel called "Sabriel" by Garth Nix. It's a great fantasy read and inspired this story to an extent. Please forgive my borrowing! The phrase was just too perfect.
> 
> While this prologue is from Ned's perspective, the majority of the story will be from Sandor and Sansa's points of view.
> 
> I'll be updating "Turncloak" next, I promise.


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